September 9, 2023 - Phil Huffy’s “Reflection”
Humdrum stands the weedy shore,
with its dismal use of shape and texture
representing a cluttered landscape,
perhaps all too real.
Even though the trees lack imagination
and stolid rocks have sat too long to pose,
all hope is not lost when they gain assistance
from their droll helpers, water and sun,
thus bringing beauty to the waiting eye:
color magnified, light celebrated,
images sorted and acclaimed,
with meaning for viewers of their art.
And when night arrives as expected,
the vista is erased as the sun demurs
and the water waits, though sometimes
sparkling in monochrome moonlight.
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Phil Huffy had a long career doing something else. Now, he writes early and often at his kitchen table while casting a wide net as to form and substance. His poetry has been published frequently and he has published three collections, including Happy Place, and Magic Words, which is also available as an audiobook.
September 8, 2023 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “You sit in the soundless dark”
Your lighter illuminates several mosquitos circling the bare skin of your chest and you watch for a moment, waiting to see which one will settle on you. You like to slap your hand against them and see if any blood comes out. Two land at the same time. One bites while you crush the other. You wipe the remains away with your finger and scratch at the latest swelling spot thinking, still, you would rather sit out here than in there, where his mother will smell the smoke on you and scowl, say something like, if you can’t stop for yourself, Ruthie, stop for him.
“You know he hates it,” May says.
“Yes, I know.”
“I gave it up when Bobby asked me to.”
“You gave it up when Bobby told you to.”
She smiles, tight lipped, no teeth. “Well, maybe I like to listen.”
“I like to listen. Less fond of obeying.”
“You might be too stubborn for marriage.”
“Good thing you didn’t marry me then.”
“Didn’t I, though?” She laughs loudly and nudges me in a way that is almost sweet, almost soul crushing.
Outside your legs burn with bites from nights before. You play a game with yourself. You sit in the soundless dark and see how long you can go without scratching.
September 5, 2023 - Rachel Coyne’s “Fluorescent Red”
Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, MN.
September 3, 2023 - Rahil Najafabadi’s “Bedroom Eyes”
Lilies are running through the water, I am asleep.
Life is so full when I can’t see, the color is painfully
red. Or was it roses on every café tabletop, as I ran
to see you before I finished my coffee. Wasn’t the worst
an argument over nothing? About the problems we don’t
have. I am penniless without watching the birds run away
from their inevitable mating. I am without sleep without
this window, the frame of people animated and rendered
to make my awakening convincing. I am still not awake,
My eyes give it away my dreaming, I smile without them
unless I’m looking right at you. The sewing machine sounds
like my distant laugh and I wonder if everyone can hear me
speaking to my mannequin. I didn’t blow any candles tonight.
I let it burn with my eyes from the light of a thousand keys.
September 2, 2023 - Taya Boyles’s “Eye of the Storm”
Grace's mother sauntered in two hours late to the engagement party, flaunting a swayback that most guests tried hard to emulate. Her heels clicked loudly as she approached, slurring Tom's name in with her ex-husband's.
She draped her arms around her daughter's hips, almost knocking them both over as they struggled to hold her weight. "Get me a whiskey neat," she demanded weakly. "Make sure it's half-full. I'll know if it's not."
Her speech was a jumble of "thank you's" without the 'h' and "riddance" without the necessary 'n's.
Everyone knew about the rain. Whether one liked it or not, it poured down before and it would fall from those same clouds again and again. If you live in a storm zone and don't check the forecast or buy a raincoat, whose fault is that? Maybe having a wedding on Valentine's brought bad luck. Maybe it was given. Being Ma's daughter meant crumbling any foundation her lead feet settled on. That made more sense, and she always went with what was tried and true.
When Tom returned with a glass of water, she knew that this ring was the closest she'd get to the eye of the storm.
September 1, 2023 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “Here is a month”
Here is a month meant to be forgotten. You are trying not to see it as a waste of time, but rather, a period of preliminary moments. There is something wrong with this September — summer is sticking to it the same way I am sticking to the plastic porch chair that should be nailed down or thrown out.
You lay in bed that night and think about all the ways people disappear. The purposeful sound of go missing — like it’s something you might do on a Sunday afternoon when fall is nowhere to be found, and I know we cannot evaporate, but I wonder what the next closest thing is.
Tomorrow you will buy a hammer.
August 27, 2023 - Rahil Najafabadi’s “Barrel Roll”
I am greeted by the same people every day,
until I go home, and I see different apparitions.
I don’t know the man at the tea shop, but he gives me
the same cup of tea and I awkwardly smile,
and thank him without him hearing. It doesn’t matter.
I pass by the bookstore––I never know shop girl’s
life. But I always think they know mine.
When I smile at you, I borrow what is yours,
and turn it into mine. I give it back sometimes,
and I take away what’s yours completely.
Now, so many wrinkles later, I say hello like you.
I wait for my tea to cool, and I remember to drink it.
When I dance, I don’t care if each hair is in its place.
Yet I am not you. We are only each other when apart.
August 26, 2023 - Ellen Zhang’s “So There We Were In Aisle 5”
So There We Were In Aisle 5
in some city that neither of us could call home.
Searching for the comfort in craft stores ready to
reimagine all senses. The truth is, we could have
slipped through or gotten lost in any census. Regardless,
we still found ourselves retracing our steps
across: the parking lot, an ocean, leukemia.
Like the way it made me wait, your hair fall out,
a falling out the shade of the spring tides.
The last time you cried, each tear clung to
your eyelashes. Growing back fluffy and right,
but also left. Right, anyways, so untangling my hands
to handle colors of dawn, prescriptions, hospital gowns.
These days, I sift through memories keeping
only the most honest ones: long coffee nights
dawning, EKGs quivering with every breath, color of
wistfulness, coloring friendships not broken but.
Disintegrated. Not knowing what was to pass, we
passed time together. Scattering of tools and craft in the
tranquility garden. Close your eyes: side of your
face drawn. In another life, you are Georges Seurat.
See what I did there, a metaphor in both senses,
the other being the touch of my fingers against
bitten, raw half-moons, wishing myself to be galaxies,
upon a separation of hands. So rather than then.
August 25, 2023 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “Fieldwork”
When it rains this early in the morning, right as the sky is waking up, or before that even, when it is so dark you are certain dawn is still hours away, I feel myself fall back into the modest mattress of a small bunk bed. I smell the rain soaking the wooden walls of our cabin and dream about staying asleep, of giving in to the weather and staying put all day, tucked tight into my sleeping bag — navy blue with my name stitched into the soft flannel, feeling more worn each year and the older we both get, the more I want to stay zipped inside, comfortably cocooned while the day starts without me. But morning was always calling and there is no way, then, not to get your hands dirty, rolling bales bloody with mud through fields that swallow the soles of your shoes as you go, and breaking in half feels so tempting sometimes but there is a holy mist that early, fog hovering above mountains as the storm breaks, light sneaking through cracks in the clouds, droplets of dew settling down on tall grass and the wet earth smells like something you can never forget, and here, in the heat, with my window open and the rain getting heavier, I slip deeper beneath the sheet, grateful for the self ordered sleep, but part of me misses getting up before the sun and seeing it all start, working in a way I feel incapable of now, and it makes me want to try, even harder, to exist again and sometimes I crave the structure of having no choice, of doing something simply because you have to, then going to sleep that night knowing you’ve done it now and can do it again.
August 22, 2023 - Ellen Zhang’s “Semaphore”
Somewhere in messy transcendent world,
there is evenness of spilling grains to
tilled soil with satisfaction of knowing.
Ah, usage of future tense…
What about unpredictability amid
hope makes you think of connection flights,
swaying of bird cage doors amid
burning houses? Don’t you ever feel
like a bird trapped in the airport? Someone
reads aloud alone in crowded rooms. Nobody
flutters which is to say: the way
I cry out to you in cold sea, deep forest, dark
fires, final hour you will not come -
I will look for you still. Distance -
like love - changes nothing, really,
when you say it enough times, every time
we use it there is
drifting. Consider roots,
sink into moistness.
We never write about
anything we can get to the
bottom:
anticipating, verge of fragility. Who can say
how we got here? What can grow?
Semaphores so steady, pulling
through my body, leaving me
with shafts of yellow
tracements.
Does the air rise still?
August 20, 2023 - Ellen Zhang’s “Mornings barely”
peeled open and there we were with hands
barely wide enough to scoop pomegranates
from their carved homes, doors wide open.
It’s not enough to miss a place as much as this
even though my feet point in the direction of home.
You tell me places are defined by the people,
but I’ve learned to never build homes of tangibles.
Coffee stirs, knitting about shafts of sunlight.
The sky mimics, softening through greenery.
Lately all I think about is vibrato of stirring silverware,
whirling blenders, gently softening butter.
The days turn over on itself leaving space
but everything still shifts from Sunday mornings.
This place has a pulse, quiet our unquiet minds.
You say heartbeats, so I picture hands sifting flour,
thick pouring batter, sprinkle of pomegranate seeds,
chocolate chips—it would close but not enough.
August 19, 2023 - Samantha De Tillio’s “Night Poem, New Cities”
NIGHT POEM, NEW CITIES
My boots tap a continuous rhythm on sidewalks littered with trash from yesterday, last week, two years ago; I thought I'd never leave but now I'm here. My feet twitch at the end of my bed in a choreography of muscle-memory, while my brain fires in all directions like the fireworks that used to be for the Fourth of July but these days sound an endless staccato like rain pattering on the hood of your car like the year we were stuck in a downpour and left before the fireworks started. Instead we pointed our headlights into the darkness toward new paths that leave me feeling hopeful yet terrified because I can’t handle the stillness or silence and the air conditioner's monotonous performance reminds me that it cuts out all the good sounds here. The vibrations of the cicadas make me feel at home. They are the excess electricity in the power lines suspended from polls marching down streets in a haphazard formation, an army that could never past muster yet mimics the anxious patterns in my brain. Both grateful to be gone and mourning the way your cast-aside bagel wrapper smudged with cream cheese still makes me hungry for more.
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Samantha De Tillio is a writer, curator, and craft scholar. Her art writing has been published in Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, where she is contributing editor, in exhibition catalogues, such as Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy, for which she is sole author, among others. Her poetry, which she has been writing since 2016, has yet to be published*, but she has read for Brooklyn Poets events and for Girlhood a Honey Dipped Girls performance series.
*until now!
August 18, 2023 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “See you someplace, sometime”
When I talk about the small sort of moments I imagine it might take for a thing like this to last, to survive something like a lifetime or, at the very least, a little longer, you tell me, actually, it takes a lot more, and I want to say, like what? Understanding? If I could speak a feeling, we might get there.
We don’t say goodbye, but rather, see you someplace, sometime.